Although there can be little doubt that fourteenth-century Cornwall possessed a historical and cultural identity of its own, it is equally clear that the county also depended on the place that it held in the wider realm. Cornwall actually fitted into the mesh of the kingdom through a rich and varied range of links that constituted a form of Cornish connectivity. It was Peregrine Horden's and Nicholas Purcell's study of the Mediterranean that first gave the idea of historical connectivity wide currency, the co-authors conceptualising this sea and its hinterland ‘of intense topographical fragmentation’ as being overlaid by an interconnected ‘kaleidoscope of human micro-ecologies’. In this sense connectivity ‘describes the way micro-regions cohere, both internally and with one another’ in this large, interdependent area by ‘potentially allaround… nearly frictionless communication and movement’.

In the case of later medieval England, however, a slightly different conceptual structure needs to be sketched from that applicable to the Mediterranean. While maritime connections undoubtedly proved important to a kingdom surrounded by the sea, the movement by land of people, goods and ideas brought about by the needs of the Crown, warfare, lordship, commerce, the law and the Church were equally significant. Growing yet denser across the later middle ages, connections transcending Cornwall come across as ubiquitous. Careerists formed ‘social bridges’, who can be seen as linking the county's inhabitants to a web of contacts across the realm and beyond. Such personal, communicative and structural networks helped to bind the peninsula into a concentric circle of connections that imbued the realm with substance while sustaining many sub- and supra-kingdom solidarities. Spreading awareness of the county's place in a rich matrix of loyalties, connectivity disseminated a consciousness of Cornish integration that actually sharpened notions of Cornishness in the peninsula itself.